Bob Brisco, director and CEO, Internet Brands

Bob Brisco has been a pioneer in Internet media for nearly two decades. He is the CEO and director of Internet Brands, an Internet publishing company that is becoming widely admired. For the last 12 years, Brisco has guided the growth of Internet Brands to become one of the region’s largest Internet enterprises.

Brisco’s key invention has been a platform to develop and manage niche media at scale. Early on, he learned the power of owning an audience, studying the success of Times Mirror, Time Warner and other legacy media titans. Significantly ahead of most of his competitors, Brisco anticipated that the power of digital media would spring from two underlying tenets: extreme targeting and user-generated content.

The primary problem with building a company on these insights was that of scale. Brisco conceptualized an approach to serve hundreds of niche Internet businesses with one centralized platform. The businesses would utilize a common set of technologies, process and people. His team has spent the past 10 years perfecting its craft and has acquired 150 Web businesses that run with the same approach and have been successfully folded into the company’s platform.

Internet Brands is now one of the largest Internet publishers in North America. The company’s consumerfacing operations are organized into seven vertical markets: automotive, health, home, legal, money, shopping and travel. In addition, the company licenses its software as enterprise solutions.

The company continues to expand quickly through a combination of organic growth and acquisitions, with about half of the company’s growth coming from each. Brisco’s goal is to double the size of the company within the next five years. His plans include more acquisitions, product development and innovation of social media tools and advertising approaches.